Speaker
Description
Climate change mitigation is a critical challenge urgently calling on individuals to adopt more pro-environmental behaviours. While prior research has primarily examined the key factors explaining why people behave (un)sustainably, the cognitive processes underlying how they make such decisions remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated the role of environmental attitudes and attentional processes during decision-making involving real trade-offs between personal financial rewards and environmental consequences. In a laboratory setting, 114 university students completed an adapted version of the carbon emission task while their eye movements were recorded via eye-tracking, providing direct measures of information acquisition and weighting preceding decision-making. After the task, environmental attitudes were assessed using the Schwartz Value Scale and the Campbell Paradigm. Using mixed-effect models, we found that stronger Campbellian environmental attitudes predicted an attentional prioritization of environmental information (i.e., CO2 emissions), as reflected by a higher proportion of fixation time on this information, and an increasing likelihood of fixating it first once participants became familiar with the task. In contrast, the attention-behaviour link appears context-dependent, influenced by factors such as the magnitude of financial incentives and environmental stakes. Notably, while attention played a role in financially less rewarding choices, we speculate that financially more rewarding decisions may involve higher-order cognitive processes. These findings emphasize the interplay between attentional dynamics, decision context, and environmental attitudes in shaping pro-environmental behaviour. Integrating these insights could inform strategies to promote pro-environmental decision-making.
| If your abstract is not accepted for an oral presentation, would you be interested in presenting it as a poster instead? | Yes |
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| If accepted by the Scientific Board, I agree to have my presentation/poster and abstract published on the Belgian Climate Centre websites and social media. | Yes |
